Archive for December, 2015

I’m developing an idea for a new painting based on photos I took many years ago. It’s a composite of a couple different shots made at a lake in North Texas.

What I’ve done is manipulated the photo into a limited range of colors as a reference for the preliminary undertone values of the painting. The overall colors of the end result will be a warm range of reds and oranges, so I’m using a complementary shade of neutral blue to start with. (Note: I don’t want to show you the original photo at this point, so as to not give away too much of what the final painting will look like. It might spoil the surprise – for both of us.)

Using Photoshop, I converted the RGB image of the original photo composite to Index mode in order to reduce the number of colors down to eight. I grouped the darkest values together and saved that as a separate file.

I’ll start the painting with a broad thin wash of light blue over the whole surface, and then add the dark shapes shown above, finishing up with 2 or 3 values of a middle tone. All the paint colors at this point will be light in value and thin washes.

I’m planning this to be another gouache painting, and I’ll show how this process works on paper in the next post. Let’s see how it turns out, shall we?

I’m not quite as far along as I had planned to be, but maybe you can get a better idea for where this is going as I rough in these figures. Those dresses are proving to be time consuming, but I’m enjoying the process. That tangent line by his elbow is bugging me, but I’ll worry about that later.

Christmas came a little early today. I placed an online order on “Black Friday” from an art store called Craftsy, recommended by a friend. I’ll admit I was wary of a store with that name having anything I’d like, but their selection wasn’t too bad, and the current holiday prices are good bargains.

I picked up a few Da Vinci gouache paints of colors I was running low on, a red sable brush, a can of Gamblin Cold Wax, and Golden’s Pastel Ground that I’ve been wanting to test out. The sale is still going on, so I might go back and get a few more items.